“Inspired” by their new intern, an insufferable crew of luckless and witless YouTube personality caricatures (characters and actor names withheld because when they can’t be arsed to act, I can’t be arsed to look them up on IMDB) plays the Elevator Game in a building where a young woman supposedly disappeared while playing it. Some not very interesting and/or obvious secrets are revealed, and some supernatural murders are committed by the mythical “Woman from the 5th Floor”.
I am a big admirer of Rebekah McKendry’s Glorious, a prime example of how to do a low budget movie with highly limited locations well, intelligently and with verve, and have been having a lot of time for her podcasting work as well.
This thing, however, is not to elevators what Glorious was to public toilets, but an utter mess of a film, the sort of thing where basically nothing works, very little is of any interest, and all talent involved doesn’t make any impression on the resulting film.
For most of the running time, the characters are insufferable one-note bits, who usually acquire their much coveted second dimension right before they are killed – because we can’t spend too much time with slightly less annoying windbags, apparently. The acting wavers between indifferent and actively terrible, but to be fair, what is a young actor to do with the nothing the script gives them?
The pacing is much too slow, with too many scenes that seem to fulfil no function for plot, characters, mood or worldbuilding, but only seem to be in the movie to fill minutes. Once things get going as much as they do here, we get a handful of rote kills, red light working overtime, and very little else – tension, fun, or depth seem to be so beyond the film, it feels absurd even bringing the words up.
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